Crescent City Connection

on the sides with a barrette, left hanging in back. More or less a Campbell Soup kid. She looked nothing like the granddaughter of a homicidal maniac.
    This thing was gnawing at Skip. Her mind raced the way it used to when she was new in the department. There were hardly any threads to pull at. And when she had pulled them all, she might have nothing. She might race around like some kind of Type A and still come up with nothing.
    That night she barely slept. She would doze, and then she would dream of something chasing her, and she would scream and Steve would wake her up—she wouldn’t have screamed at all, just made the little gasps of nightmares.
    Around seven she fell into a sweaty torpor and awoke two hours later—it was Saturday and Steve had taken pains to let her sleep. It was Napoleon who woke her, barking at birds in the courtyard.
    She turned over grumpily and tried to go back to sleep. She was too groggy for mind-race now, but she had a residual panic. She was almost afraid to try anything lest she run out of things to try. She felt paralyzed.
    How in the hell to find a man who was “an artist,” whatever that might be, and about whom she knew nothing else except that he liked to wear white. What kind of white? Jeans? Ice cream suits? Robes?
    She looked him up in the phone book, and then threw it across the room, frustrated.
    Who knew him? Other artists, maybe. That was a thought.
    His parents and siblings. Only, two of those were missing and he didn’t talk to the other one.
    It might be Saturday, but she was going to work on this thing until she dropped—which would probably be about noon, the way she felt now.
    She opened her home Jacomine file and fingered the People magazine piece Aunt Alice had given her—the one about Rosemarie Owens. After talking to Irene Jacomine, Shellmire had said he’d send someone to interview her.
    But had he?
    Skip thought,
I hate this national case shit. I’d rather do it myself.
    Idly, she dialed Dallas information and asked for Owens. You could have knocked her over when the robot spat out a number. Frantically, she scrambled for a pencil and ended up having to call back.
    She got a recording: “This is the voice mail of Rosemarie Owens. If you are interested in the rights to my story, please call Natalie Rosenbusch at ICM in L.A. I am not giving interviews at this time. I am not investing any money, nor am I contributing to any new nonprofit organizations, nor am I able to raise my usual contributions to old charities, nor am I interested in discovering any new relatives. This is an informational tape only. It will not be checked for messages.”
    Even in her nasty humor, Skip had to chuckle. “These Texans,” she said to herself and dialed ICM in L.A.
    Failing to rouse anyone, she checked information for Natalie or N. Rosenbusch and came up with an “N.”
    It was two hours earlier in L.A., and N. Rosenbusch was obviously still out cold.
    “Sorry to wake you,” she said. “But this is Detective Skip Langdon in New Orleans and I have an emergency. I need to call Rosemarie Owens about her granddaughter.”
    Suddenly Natalie got a lot more lucid.
    “You’re really pissing me off. She doesn’t have a granddaughter—you heard her message. She doesn’t want to talk to you, and I don’t appreciate being waked up with bullshit stories.”
    “She has a son named Daniel and a granddaughter named Lovelace who may be in grave danger.” She considered using the Jacomine name but decided that would make Rosemarie too angry. “Her ex-husband is wanted for murder and may try to contact her. She really needs to call me right away.”
    “Lady, you are so full of shit.””
    She hung up.
    It had all happened so fast, so unexpectedly.
I should have done it from the office
, Skip thought, and called Headquarters to say she was expecting a call from Natalie Rosenbusch, just in case.
    Fat chance
, she thought, throwing on a pair of slacks barely passable for office wear.
    It took her less than half an hour to get there, and Natalie hadn’t called—but she was probably still home in bed. Skip called back and left a message for her: “I forgot to leave my phone number.”
    In a moment her phone gave a little half ring, and she had to smile, figuring Natalie had done exactly what she would have done—dialed Headquarters, asked for Detective Langdon, and hung up quickly when it turned out she was real, the call was going through. Ten minutes later Rosemarie